Leading Virtual Teams
In the last two decades , organizations have become increasingly global and complex. In addition to that constantly changing customer needs, technological advancements and continuous competitor innovation have driven the rapid use of virtual teams.
A virtual team is a group “of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks” . Virtual teams make it possible to leverage the capabilities of individuals and organizations which are not part of your organization and geography to rapidly develop innovative solutions to customers at any time and anywhere in the world.
Challenges
Having a team in which some of your team members come from organizations outside of your organization and work in different locations produces a giant leap in leadership complexity including the following:
- Different business locations can have different cultural values, traditions, business practices and legal requirements
- Time zone differences may be as large as 14 hours, how do you schedule a meeting?
- Difficulties in building and maintaining trust
- Socializing the team around common values
- Member coaching
- Team learning
- Conflict and issues resolution
- Lack of face-to-face communication
What Makes a Team Effective?
There are some basic principals while leading a team (virtual or otherwise). The needs to be heard, feel supported, grow and develop, connect and socialize are some of them. While I was searching about the topic, I came across a project. It is a big research project about team effectiveness held in 2012 and I decided to share its findings with you.
Digital giant, Google, started the project “Project Aristotle” to find the algorithms of perfect team (traits, backgrounds, skills etc.) in 2012. They studied hundreds of Google’s teams and figured out why some delivers better results while others don’t. The Aristotle team included statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, engineers, and researchers. But disappointingly, they found no clear pattern that could be generating a perfect team.
However, they were able to identify five characteristics of high-performing teams.
- Psychological Safety
This is by far the most important characteristics of high-performing teams. Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard first introduced the contruct of “team psychological safety” and defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”
If you are part of a team with high psychological safety, you feel safe yourself to voice your opinions up knowing that teammates don’t judge, embarrass or punish you. There are trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves. This leads to more productivity, innovation and employee engagement.
For more about psyhological safety, you can read Admendson’s research paper and watch TEDx talk.
- Dependability
On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time.
- Clear Structure and Goals
An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness. Goals can be set at the individual or group level, and must be specific, challenging, and attainable.
- Meaning
Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness.
- Impact
The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams. Seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals can help reveal impact.
You can get detail information about Project Aristotle from here.
7 Principles for High-Performing Virtual Teams
Leading “Virtual Teams” is a complex issue and to be successful we need to apply new processes and skills. You’ll find 7 principles which can be used to form a foundation for high-performing virtual teams below:
Establish a Common Purpose and Goals with Stakeholders
Virtual team stakeholders are the senior team leaders of each unit or organization represented on the team who are responsible for ensuring that the right process, people, and resources are applied to achieve their unit or organization’s goal for team membership. Understand each stakeholder’s purpose for assigning people and resources to the team, and the goal(s) they have established for their team participation.
Develop Team Charter
A team charter is like a detailed job description for the entire team. It’s a communication document to be given to key stakeholders and other decision-makers in units and organizations represented on the team to provide a clear picture of the team’s common purpose and goals and a high-level statement of how the team works together. It is highly important to develop it collaboratively with all team members and face-to-face. Some of the important topics a team charter should include;
- Common purpose and goals (previously defined with stakeholders)
- Clearly defined roles, responsibilities, tasks and work processes
- Methodologies, tools and connectivity requirements and preferences of each team member. Best time for meetings for each team member during the week, types of collaboration needed, use of email vs. instant messaging, and rules governing confidentiality, which is crucial when you have cross-organizational virtual teams.
- Core values
- Metrics of success
Develop and Agree on Action Plan
Action plan that specifies what you – as a team- are going to accomplish immediately and when you will create your first output. This is your first opportunity to apply and “test” the operating principles documented in the team charter. Some of the objectives are;
- Set clear expectations for how the team will start its work together by focusing on immediate action
- Apply and “road test” the operating principles and processes agreed to in the team charter
- Develop and monitor team member’s work plan. Emphasize that they are responsible for creating an ambitious, but realistic work plan and that they are safe to voice their point of view about any aspect of the plan
- Establish the cultural value of being dependable individually and as a team
- Create a frame for the team to use in developing an operating plan for how they will fulfill their common purpose and achieve the goals set in the team charter.
Follow-Up
Collaboratively review Results vs. Action Plan, leverage, learn, and revise as needed. Keep the team focused on fulfilling the common purpose and achieving the goal.
Select Appropriate Digital Tools / Business Platform
Selecting a collaboration platform that meets team members’ need encourages interaction and supports effective co-creation. Define clear rules of engagement that protect the interests of all members of the ecosystem and streamline the work process. The list some of the tools by category is below:
- Collaboration Tools; Slack, Webex Teams, MS Teams
- Project Management Tools; MS Project, Jira, Primavera, Trello
- File Sharing Tools; Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive
- Meeting Tools; Zoom, Webex, Skype, BlueJeans
- Document Co-creation Tools; Google Docs,Conceptboard, Prezi
- For developers; GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
Beware of Zoom Fatigue
- Regarding Covid-19 pandemic is exception, at normal times, create occasions for face-to-face meetings to overcome the problem of employee feelings of isolation and disconnection. When working remotely, even the most skilled and self-confident employees can experience a sense of organizational isolation and estrangement from the social fabric of the workgroup. They may feel “out of the loop,” and vulnerable to missed opportunities to work on important assignments or to be eligible for promotion.
- During Covid-19 pandemic, almost every office workers have been started working from home. Zoom has become popular during this period. As time goes by, many has found it exhausted (at least 10 Zoom meetings a day, connection problems, late night meetings, etc.). It’s not possible to avoid using digital tools but during virtual meetings spend some time to learn team member’s wellbeing. It reduces fatigue, concerns and increases trust. This article gives you extra details about the underlying factors of Zoom Fatigue, Why Zoom Video Chats Are So Exhausting
Virtual Team Coaching
Coaching to a virtual team is significantly different because the team leader is usually not the coachee’s solid line manager – they might not even work in the same unit or organization. If you consider key points below, you can address Google’s high-performaning teams’ characteristics (Psychological Safety, Meaning, Impact and Dependability ).
- Respect the person’s individuality, regardless of whether s/he is from a more individualistic or collectivistic culture
- Build the foundation for a deep trust relationship by ensuring that each team member is comfortable interacting with you
- Build psychological safety by listening empathically. Demonstrate that you understand their point of view and value their ideas for how to achieve the common purpose and goals
- Highlight the importance of active participation in the meetings and making sure that everyone got the opportunity to speak. This strengthens sense of belonging to teams and fosters cohesion
- While building team charter collaboratively, demostrate positive intent by presenting team’s purpose and goals, exploring how achieving them would relate to their personal and professional interests and bring value to each of them and their function/organization
- Keep team members connected to the common purpose and goals, emphasize “their story” in the work. This increases motivation.
- Help team members learn how to work interdependently in the specific team
- Support sharing of experience and letting everyone participate when sharing ideas
- A key factor for strengthening motivation and building trust is to enable face-to-face meetings with the team and the external stakeholders. Try to find a way to make it happen.